Re: Enterprise 8i on Linux or Solaris?

Daryl, let me add my voice to those recommending Sun. I dont work for sun (My personal preference is a Compaq Alphaserver, but Sun is a mature, stable, supported platform with a long history of running Oracle well). Linux will be there (and soon it appears) but I would be cautious about trusting my business to it only because the examples of scaling I've seen with Linux seem to always involve some extra something (code patch, unique network topology, etc).

Sun has been an Oracle partner for years and the benefit of that partnership to customers has been a significant ability of the two companies to work together and support each others strengths. Suns SPARC hardware architecture has always outperformed (and is more reliable) then the PC architecture. In addition, Sun has been in the UNIX business a long time and has a better (stable, scalable, manageable - Sun marketing can bore you to tear, um, tell you all about it) engineered product that they support 24 x 7. Sun offers a 64 bit platform which performs significantly better than the 32 bit architecture currently available on PC platforms.

You should consider your workload requirements. If you need to support 20 users with stable applications with moderate throughput requirements using a few GB of data then Oracle on Linux may be a great and cost-effective solution. If you need to support a higher demand environment then you shoud definately consider Sun (or Dec Alpha :).

Sorry for the rambling response - just a few thoughts of the cuff.

Cliff

daryl_at_McGregor.bc.ca wrote:

> I'm making some purchasing decisions for my company. We're going to
> purchase Enterprise 8i, but I'm not sure yet what operating system that
> I want to go with.
>
> Linux boxes tend to be cheaper, both for hardware reasons and Oracle
> Licensing.
>
> Some people believe that a Solaris platform would be stronger but nobody
> can tell me why. The only reasoning I hear is that Oracle has been
> designing for Solaris for such a long time. I need a little more than
> just hearsay to make an educated decision.
>
> What are facts here? Is a Solaris platform better? If I go with
> Solaris, I have to justify the increased cost. I've seen a lot of
> postings here about installation problems with RH 7.0 but that's not a
> very concrete reason for selecting Solaris over Linux.
>
> Got some facts? Need the info.
>
> Daryl Beauregard
> GIS Analyst and DBA
> The McGregor Group
> Prince George, Canada
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
  Received on Wed Oct 25 2000 - 07:53:56 CDT